to be woven in our dreaming
This summer, combing through lists of running quotes in search of a mantra, I came across one that resonated with me, from Bill Bowerman: "Everything you need is already inside."
There was something important to me in this idea about capability, but it also called forth the echo of another, half-remembered expression from the banks of my memory. In J. K. Rowling's words: "We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."
***
I thought about that again this fall, part of a dawning recognition that I was losing touch with myself and that I needed to rekindle my love affair with words, which have always been a portal to worlds for me. Imagination was the first stone I could pull from the sand, an anchor, a thing about which I could say, This is a part of who I am. This is embedded in the way I think about myself.
The imaginative has always held a draw for me, but my own creative aptitudes lie more in arranging and juxtaposing, I think, than in conjuring worlds and calling forth stories. Maybe especially because of this, I have always loved getting lost in other people's worlds and contemplating all the possible stories, not always told, that might unfold in those worlds. Mine was the kind of girlhood filled with deep nights, hiding under the covers with a flashlight and a book, moonlight illuminating the trees of my backyard until they appeared otherworldly, and a pocket knife securely stowed in a tiny drawstring bag on my bedside windowsill, so that I would be ready should I ever be whisked away to Narnia.
To me, my imagination is the part of me that believes in the extraordinary and explores possibilities, that fervently hunts for more.
I thought about all of this, and I thought, if I were ever to want a tattoo, maybe I could get the little imagination bubble from Glitch.
***
And then fall ebbed into winter, and I learned with dismay that Glitch was closing down. I can describe it in regular words -- a browser-based sandbox MMO -- but that hardly captures what this game meant to me in the year and a half I played it. It gifted me with a fantastical, crazily beautiful world, full of landscapes and animals and trees; and everything in Glitch was about creating, imagining, building up, being kind and whimsical and an explorer of the world.
Right after the announcement, I came across dozens and dozens of the saddest goodbye notes, piled over the world like fallen snow. The one I remember best said, "What will happen to us? 25 days until the end of our world." After that, I couldn't really bring myself to play Glitch in its last month, beset by a sense of futility. But on the very last day, this past Sunday, I logged into the game, sold off most of my collected possessions, emptied my tower, shrunk my house, wandered through new regions of the world and photographed them for posterity. At the very end, a few of us who had started playing together all those months ago gathered together one last time in our old home of Venet Root in Bortola and posed for snapshots. And then, in the last seconds, the strains of Goodnight, Groddle played one final time, and then the world went dark.
Glitch is gone now, but I have my avatar and my snaps, and I have ordered the art book and the soundtrack, because Tiny Speck did everything right. But also it will live on in my imagination, the same way that Narnia and Avonlea and Hogwarts do, abstract but permanent and bigger than they were. I was only lucky enough that this once, I wasn't merely told of a world I loved enough to imagine in it; for a while, I was able to inhabit it and to contribute to its unfolding stories. Somewhere out there (in here, in the other-dimensional space where who I am dwells), my Glitch still walks the streets of Ur, scooping jellisacs, petting bubble trees, squeezing her Weasley chickens, planting rookswort, harvesting paper, creating teleportation scripts for her travel agency, and poking very stinky cheese for small shiny objects with no intrinsic value with which to decorate the world and, like Gretel's breadcrumbs, mark her way home.
***
The best worlds we meet live on in us. Because we have the power to imagine.
There was something important to me in this idea about capability, but it also called forth the echo of another, half-remembered expression from the banks of my memory. In J. K. Rowling's words: "We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."
I thought about that again this fall, part of a dawning recognition that I was losing touch with myself and that I needed to rekindle my love affair with words, which have always been a portal to worlds for me. Imagination was the first stone I could pull from the sand, an anchor, a thing about which I could say, This is a part of who I am. This is embedded in the way I think about myself.
The imaginative has always held a draw for me, but my own creative aptitudes lie more in arranging and juxtaposing, I think, than in conjuring worlds and calling forth stories. Maybe especially because of this, I have always loved getting lost in other people's worlds and contemplating all the possible stories, not always told, that might unfold in those worlds. Mine was the kind of girlhood filled with deep nights, hiding under the covers with a flashlight and a book, moonlight illuminating the trees of my backyard until they appeared otherworldly, and a pocket knife securely stowed in a tiny drawstring bag on my bedside windowsill, so that I would be ready should I ever be whisked away to Narnia.
To me, my imagination is the part of me that believes in the extraordinary and explores possibilities, that fervently hunts for more.
I thought about all of this, and I thought, if I were ever to want a tattoo, maybe I could get the little imagination bubble from Glitch.
And then fall ebbed into winter, and I learned with dismay that Glitch was closing down. I can describe it in regular words -- a browser-based sandbox MMO -- but that hardly captures what this game meant to me in the year and a half I played it. It gifted me with a fantastical, crazily beautiful world, full of landscapes and animals and trees; and everything in Glitch was about creating, imagining, building up, being kind and whimsical and an explorer of the world.
Right after the announcement, I came across dozens and dozens of the saddest goodbye notes, piled over the world like fallen snow. The one I remember best said, "What will happen to us? 25 days until the end of our world." After that, I couldn't really bring myself to play Glitch in its last month, beset by a sense of futility. But on the very last day, this past Sunday, I logged into the game, sold off most of my collected possessions, emptied my tower, shrunk my house, wandered through new regions of the world and photographed them for posterity. At the very end, a few of us who had started playing together all those months ago gathered together one last time in our old home of Venet Root in Bortola and posed for snapshots. And then, in the last seconds, the strains of Goodnight, Groddle played one final time, and then the world went dark.
Glitch is gone now, but I have my avatar and my snaps, and I have ordered the art book and the soundtrack, because Tiny Speck did everything right. But also it will live on in my imagination, the same way that Narnia and Avonlea and Hogwarts do, abstract but permanent and bigger than they were. I was only lucky enough that this once, I wasn't merely told of a world I loved enough to imagine in it; for a while, I was able to inhabit it and to contribute to its unfolding stories. Somewhere out there (in here, in the other-dimensional space where who I am dwells), my Glitch still walks the streets of Ur, scooping jellisacs, petting bubble trees, squeezing her Weasley chickens, planting rookswort, harvesting paper, creating teleportation scripts for her travel agency, and poking very stinky cheese for small shiny objects with no intrinsic value with which to decorate the world and, like Gretel's breadcrumbs, mark her way home.
The best worlds we meet live on in us. Because we have the power to imagine.